Biography

Vitaly Napadow is associate professor at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, where he is also the Director of the Center for Integrative Pain NeuroImaging (CiPNI). Dr. Napadow’s laboratory has pioneered the application of non-invasive neuroimaging techniques to better understand the brain circuitry underlying aversive perceptual states, particularly chronic pain. Somatosensory, cognitive and affective factors all influence the malleable experience of pain, and Dr. Napadow’s Lab has applied human functional and structural neuroimaging to localize and suggest mechanisms by which different brain circuitries modulate pain perception. His lab’s recent neuroimaging publication reporting on the largest cLBP cohort to date, characterized how neuroimaging and physiological markers encode and predict clinical back pain severity. Dr. Napadow’s neuroimaging research also aims to better understand how non-pharmacological therapies, from acupuncture and transcutaneous neuromodulation to cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness meditation training, ameliorate these states. Dr. Napadow has more than 140 publications in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, is past-President of the Society for Acupuncture Research and serves on numerous conference, journal, and NIH review panels. He was recently named to the Distinguished Investigator Council by the Academy for Radiology & Biomedical Imaging Research and received the Excellence in Integrative Medicine Research Award by the European Society for Integrative Medicine.